Graphicupgrade MacPro 2009

what is the better Graphicupgrade for my MacPro 2009? - the AMD Radeon HD 7970 3Gb (ram) with 20% better open gl and 1gb more ram or the EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 2 GB which can CUDA - is cuda anyway relevant for Isadora? or just fpr AE and FC?

thanx Unfenswinger - but the power cable come with the card - i think the nVidia 970 is to much for the budget and i have a macpro 2013 for rendering - the macpro 2009 quadcore,ssd,16gb ram is a showcomputer which i want upgrade for a show where i have to run 2 fullhd projector, with a lot of mapping and maybe 8 layer of full hd content in the same time- you thing the 680 will do that?

It hasn't got anything to do with the cable coming with the card, the Mac Pro is not designed to draw the required power for that 7970 through the power cables. This will mean more power is drawn through the PCIe connector than Apple designed for.

The nVidia cards I specified both fit within the designed power draw limits for the Mac Pro.

It's up to you if you want to risk your logic board and in terms of OpenCL performance the 7970 is much better than the 680\. There are plenty of people using such cards in their Mac Pros but I chose to go with the 680 because my Mac Pro is heaving with HDDs, external HDDs and expansion cards so I didn't want to risk overloading the PSU.

The flashed BIOS does nothing to alter the power draw of the 7970 unfortunately.

Only you can decide if you want to take the risk using a card that exceeds Apple's design spec. I made the decision to keep within Apple's guidelines as a logic board failure would be an expensive replacement and I'm trying to eek as much life out of the computer as possible until I replace it with the next revision of the new Mac Pro.

Unless you need the boot screen i.e. for Bootcamp etc on the Mac just get a standard PC card.

I've got an unflashed EVGA 680 PC card dual 6pin power which is identical to the Mac version minus BIOS, works perfectly well. There are super clocked versions of the 680 that exceed Apple's guidelines, normally they've got 4GB VRAM and have 6 pin and 8 pin power.

You may find the GPU fan speed is slightly higher than with a flashed card, if it bothers you run something like Geek3D Benchmark for a few seconds which causes OS X to notice the card, then spins the fans to 2000 rpm then back down to a quiet 800 rpm.